Music

Oct 04, 2012, 09:56AM

Fake Jesus Freaks and Overheated Hippie Prose

So, I came across a child of
God… well, no, not at Yasgur’s Farm and not in 1969, but in our dank,
unfinished, cricket-filled basement just last weekend when I was trying to get rid
of the excess magazines and newspapers I’ve collected since LBJ was president.
Picked up a slightly-mildewed copy of Rolling
Stone with Woodstock on the cover, thought about the Joni Mitchell/CNSY
song, which zapped me back to the halls of Huntington High School one morning
in 1970 when a stoner buddy proclaimed that he was joining the ranks of Jesus
Freaks, a “movement” that lasted about three months and was covered, curiously
and approvingly by Time magazine.
Taken aback, I asked Kyle what led him to such a weird conversion, and, no
shocker here, he said, “Chicks dig Jesus, and as long as I keep off the weed, I’ve
got it made with Melody.” As it turned out, Kyle and Melody did make some sort
of music together, as we all learned on the bus one afternoon, and shortly
after he chucked her to the curb. He was a pretty good guy, but this—both the
Jesus ruse and woo-and-dump of gullible Melody—wasn’t his finest moment.

Tossed that memory aside,
and kept digging through the cartons of publications, quickly discarding back
issues of Life, Vanity Fair, Chicago Reader,
New York Observer, Village Voice, Creem, Manhattan, Inc., Straight Creek Journal, The Real Paper, Ramparts, The New Republic and on and on, until I noticed the February, 1970 edition of Circus magazine. As a young teenager I’d
scrape together two quarters on occasion—usually while waiting for the new Rolling Stone to arrive via U.S. mail—for
a copy of Circus, and while it was
kind of thin on coherent content, it was still before the explosion of rock ‘n’
roll related print. Apparently, the monthly survived, in many guises, until
2006, but my quasi-infatuation with Circus was short-lived.

In any case, what grabbed my
attention last Saturday was the cover of this particular Circus, with the headline, “These People Are Approaching 30—Will
They Survive the 70’s?” The writer’s intent was not literal about the 20
mini-pics of stars on the cover, but rather wondering if they’d still be
relevant in the Age of Aquarius. As history marched along, Jimi Hendrix and
Janis Joplin croaked that fall; Jim Morrison the year after; and John Lennon
barely made it through the 70s. Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, John Mayall (36 at the
time, but who’s counting) and Ray Davies all survived; Elvis’s curtain call was
in ’77, and Johnny Cash and George Harrison succumbed many years later. Yoko,
of course, will live till 105, and no matter how assiduously her legacy is
scrubbed and burnished, for hundreds of thousands of people of my generation,
she’s still the shrew who broke up the Beatles. (I’d call her a cunt, but I’m
not British, so that’s not kosher.)

Inside, Chris Hodenfield
(who wrote for Rolling Stone and a
slew of other magazines), dominated this particular issue, and this excerpt
from his meditation on the 60s is choice:

Girls swoon over a
cat, who, say, doesn’t come on like a burly, hairy lumberjack, but rather a
silky dude. With a scream, in the corridors of Alvin Lee and James Morrison, of
a bitch in heat… but is in firm reality, the howl of the Real Man, a man of a
dozen facets, and capabilities being both lion and butterfly for his woman. A
girl who wants to submit herself totally to this is correct. A guy who gets
furiously-swimming nightmares about rolling with an impassioned tigress like
Janis Joplin or Tina Turner is also normal… Get your rocks off on the people
who jive on stage.

Man, that is exhausting to
read, likely far more taxing than the minute or two that Hodenfield, presumably
well-oiled on this or that mind-altering commodity, tapped it down on his
typewriter.

Anyway, sub-prime nostalgia
like this copy of Circus is easy to
come by—considering I’ve barely made a dent in the basement morgue—and after I
read a review of Let It Bleed in that
issue that didn’t even mention “Gimme Shelter” or “Monkey Man,” I then tossed in
the refuse room, where one day this spring a junkman will haul all this garbage
away.